Digital video is rapidly becoming an important source for information entertainment, among which home video probably constitutes the type of information entertainment that many people are increasingly becoming interested. With the size of home video collections growing, technology is needed to effectively browse videos in a short time without losing the content, especially the salient content of the video. “Video skimming” is such a technique that extracts compact, content rich abstractions of longer videos. Ideally, a video skim preserves the essential content summarizing an original video in a compact representation. The compact representation should greatly reduce viewing time and assist the viewer in determining whether to view the video in an uncondensed format or perhaps to categorize the video or segments of the video.
One technique used for creating video skims, increases the frame rates across the whole video. This “fast forward” approach might achieve a tenfold decrease in viewing time, but seriously degrades coherence, perturbing audio information and distorting visual information.
Another approach used for creating video skims is to drop frames at regular intervals, but preserve the source video frame rate to overcome the “fast forward” approach. Unfortunately, this approach often omits essential information because such essential information is often found in the frames that are dropped at the regular intervals.
Still another approach discards shots either randomly or selectively. This approach may provide decent results for an entertainment movie. It does not, however, lend itself to home video material, because home videos often document people's lives where all shots are more or less equally important. Thus, randomly or selectively discarding shots does shorten the video for a video skim, but often omits material that is important to the viewer.